Defining era had a profound impact

FORTY years ago today, the Miners’ Strike began.

On March 12, 1984 – six days after the National Coal Board announced plans to close 20 pits with the loss of 20,000 jobs – National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) president Arthur Scargill called a national strike against the closures.

By the end of the first day, more than half of the UK’s 187,000 miners had downed tools.

The strike, which was to last almost a year – until March 5, 1985 – pitted then prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative government against thousands of miners and their trade union.

It became the biggest industrial dispute in British post-war history and has become a defining era in Wales’ own history – no coalfield community was immune to its toll as picket lines, policing, protests and politics converged.

And there is no doubt that what unfolded 40 years ago has had such a profound impact on those who lived it, witnessed it and remember it today. It caused longlasting division within communities but it also brought others together in vital support networks.

“That attitude that lots of people had, like us, which was, ‘We’re in this together as a family,’ says Sian James, wife of striking miner and mother of two who became part of Dulais Valley Support Group.

Geraint Burgess, who worked at collieries including Treforgan and Blaenant, is right, however, when he tells the Western Mail: “After the Miners’ Strike when we went back to work, it was never the same.”

The miners may have marched back to work after 12 long months but it was the beginning of the end. A wave of pit closures followed the strike and within five years only five pits remained opened. Today there is only one.

The Tory government at the time has called it the ‘modernisation of the British economy’ as union power was quelled and the march of privatising nationalised industries took hold. Today it is argued, it laid the path towards devolution.

However, Wales’ former mining communities, where little other employment existed then, continue to be dogged by persistent poverty now. Such deprivation has become entrenched and multigenerational.

The 2024 landscape in so many aspects is very different and yet so familiar and unchanged to the landscape of 40 years ago. And Wales’ communities still deserve so much better.